5 Ecommerce Product Pages More Likely to Make me Cry than Buy!

When it comes to shopping, I’d opt to do it online every single time. Given the choice of navigating through busy shops (where old age pensioners wouldn’t think twice about killing you for the last of anything that’s labelled ‘half price’) and chilling in front of the telly with a Macbook or an iPad, I’ll take the latter, please. That’s not to say, however, that online shopping is always as easy as it should be, as these e-commerce product pages highlight.

1. Peddlers Cycles

peddlers-cycles.co.uk has a brilliant range of high end bikes available. Unfortunately, it’s let down by its sub-standard product pages. I really believe that online retailers selling such high value products are more at risk of putting potential customers off by making the sort of omissions Peddlers is making.

Peddlers Cycles Product Page

So, let’s say I’m about to spend £2,000 on a bike from a retailer I have never previously bought from. What do I want? I want:

Reviews – both about the bike and retailer. Convince me I won’t get fleeced by putting my card details into your website!

Pictures – this is a high value product. Therefore, I expect to see plenty of images and maybe some video.

A unique description actually selling the bike to me. What I actually get is a standard list of features as published by the manufacturer and available from any other website selling this bike.

I’m a greedy consumer and I expect to be able to research products on any device, but visiting on my mobile leaves me with a hideous pinch and zoom experience.

2. Converse

Like millions of other people, I’m an iPad shopper! In fact, eConsultancy last year wrote a post claiming iPad conversion rates are twice as high as those from desktops! Data we have at Tecmark on our clients would confirm that too! So that’s why I was so surprised to encounter this on converse.co.uk on an iPad:

Uh-Oh, you need a mobile site!

“Uh oh, you need flash,” Converse tells me as I’m trying to spend £60+ on a pair of shoes my Nan insists are no different than the ones she saw on the market for 3 quid.

Uh oh, Converse. I think you need a new website.

I know it’s a more complex page than a simple ‘buy this product.’ There’s much more functionality needed to enable people to customise a product. But, hey… HTML5 will do what flash can do and it won’t scare your iPad users away.

iPad traffic for B2C ecommerce sites is a potential gold mine based on the stats we have and, on that basis, I declare this an ecommerce product page fail.

3. Calendar Club

When you look at the product pages on calendarclub.co.uk, it’s hard to fault them:

Plenty of images, clear reminder that delivery is free and a simple way to add the product to your basket and buy. But what this image doesn’t show is this little warning I got before the page loaded:

My reaction when I see something like this is to leave the site…

When a big warning comes up like that, you feel automatically inclined to just exit! And you know what? The warning is unnecessary. If you visit a Calendar Club product page on a desktop (or a flash enabled tablet) you get the ability to zoom in and out on the images – not something that’s absolutely essential, but a nice feature, granted. On iPad you don’t get that feature. But as the first image shows, the product page still looks absolutely fine. What I’m saying is, why not just load the product page as is without the weird warning first? Users are unlikely to be so concerned about the inability to zoom in on Tom Daley’s belly button that they decide they’re not going to part with that tenner. But the warning is off putting and annoying.

4. JE James Cycles

I know this is the second bike retailer I’ve featured, but some of the same issues are prevalent.

JE James Cycles Product Pages

No reviews, just one standard image and no detailed or close up images. This is an expensive piece of kit! I want to know exactly what I am buying if I am going to buy it online. Again, no reviews or any trust signals to convince me that a retailer I have previously never heard of is reputable and a generally unattractive looking page.

5. Electronic Megastore

Aside from the fact this page on electronicmegastore.com is unattractive, it’s also hugely confusing.

Confusing and untrustworthy-looking.

I arrived at the site from a UK search, but immediately the currency is in $. That would be fine if there was some clarification somewhere of where they ship to. But there’s nothing at all.

If you visit on the desktop version, there’s a UK flag, UK phone number but again, the currency defaults to the $. On the right hand side, there’s a facility to change it, but it should be something done automatically. It’s fairly straightforward to detect where a user is browsing from and to load the currency based on that.

In addition, there’s nothing about this site (again, one I have never previously purchased from) that would reassure me that I can put my card details in and not get ripped off. Reviews, testimonials etc all missing.

Consumers Expect…

I might seem a bit fussy. Lots of complaints of mine relate to the experience on Apple mobile and tablet devices, for example. But that really is ‘the norm’ now. Yes, consumers are fussy. Yes, we simply expect a seamless shopping experience on multiple devices. We expect quick loading sites that give us all the information we need in the quickest and simplest format for us to digest it. We expect websites not just to sell to us, but to guide us in our purchasing decisions and to convince us of their trustworthiness.

And if an ecommerce retailer isn’t prepared to do that? Well, its potential customers will find a competitor who is (or will buy from Amazon).